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Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > March/April 2002

Sea Monsters and Other Ancient Beasts

A tale from a Grecian urn

By Adrienne Mayor

A strange, grim, menacing creature lurks on one of the ancient Greek vases in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The scene painted on this vase—a Corinthian black-figure krater dating to between 560 and 540 B.C.—is known to art historians as the oldest illustration of the ancient legend of the Monster of Troy. In Greek myth, a terrible monster suddenly appears on the Trojan coast, where it causes great destruction. To appease the beast, the king of Troy, Laomedon, sends his daughter Hesione as a sacrifice, but Hercules arrives just in time 046to slay the monster and […]

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Endnotes

1.

See Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 400–402. Portions of this article are based on my paper, “The ‘Monster of Troy’ Vase: The Earliest Artistic Record of a Vertebrate Fossil Discovery?” Oxford Journal of Archaeology (February 2000), pp. 57–63; and on my The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000).

2.

Cornelius Vermeule, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Bulletin 61 (1963), p. 162.

3.

John Boardman, “Very Like a Whale—Classical Sea Monsters,” in A.E. Farkas et al., eds., Monsters and Demons in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: Papers Presented in Honor of Edith Porada (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1987), pp. 73–84.

4.

Karl Schefold, Gods and Heroes in Late Archaic Greek Art (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 150, 314.

5.

Pausanias, Guide to Greece 9.18.2–5, 1.35.3, 3.3.7.

6.

Philostratus, On Heroes 8:3–14.

7.

Richard Fortey, “They Might Be Giants,” London Review of Books (November 2, 2000), p. 25.

8.

I would like to thank paleontologists Eric Buffetaut, Christine Janis, George Koufos, Dale Russell, Sevket Sen, Matt Smith and Nikos Solounias for sharing their expertise.